By now, Will Allen's story is familiar to most Milwaukeeans: Son of a sharecropper, former pro basketball player; leaves corporate job to take up farming; buys the last bit of agriculturally zoned land in the city.

Neighborhood kids stop by his fledgling greenhouse and Allen begins to turn his sights to the notion of the urban farm - fresh, affordable, locally grown produce - and groundbreaking methods that now have a global reach.

A born farmer, right?

True, but Allen didn't always embrace his farm roots, stretching back hundreds of years on his mother's side. He worked on the family farm growing up, and didn't much care for it.

"When I left the farm at 18, I said, 'Never again will I do this hard work,' " says Allen, whose basketball career led him to play professionally in Europe.

It was in Belgium, helping on a farm of a teammate's parents, that Allen's deep ties to farming were reawakened.

"I touched the soil, and there I was. I helped them plant potatoes," he says. "Everybody should touch the soil. It really changes how you feel about everything in your life. It's therapeutic."

In Europe, he was able to do some farming, growing food that he shared with other Americans playing basketball in Belgium.

Still, after he left basketball, he took up corporate work - managing several Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in the Milwaukee area, then working for Procter & Gamble as a sales rep.

"I had a burning desire to go back into farming," he says. He had a farm in Oak Creek, his wife Cyndy's hometown. In the meantime, he kept at the corporate job.

In January 1993, he was driving one day to a sales call in the Milwaukee area when he drove by a run-down greenhouse for sale at 55th and Silver Spring.

Allen circled back, took down the phone number and approached the city about buying it.

He learned the kids in the nearby housing project often crossed the street to throw rocks at the glass greenhouses.

"The whole place was a mess," Allen writes in his upcoming book, "The Good Food Revolution" (Gotham Books, $26).

"But I could feel its potential."

It was a gamble. Allen and his wife had three children, the youngest just entering college. They'd paid for all three - a son and two daughters - to attend private high school.

Allen, then 43, cashed in his retirement savings, took out a mortgage and bought the property - the last parcel of city land zoned for agricultural use - in what Allen calls a "food desert." A large grocery story in the neighborhood had just closed at the time, and the closest - and cheapest - food sources were fast-food restaurants.

Allen told the city the neighborhood needed a place to buy fresh produce. At first, he sold just produce from his Oak Creek farm there. He opened with a piece of plywood painted with the words: "Will's Roadside Farm Market."

He would make good on a promise to involve those kids who once threw rocks at the greenhouses, in what went on inside them.

Today, Growing Power, Allen's not-for-profit training and community food center, has more than 100 employees and 200 acres of production, including traditional farms in Merton, Jackson and Oak Creek.

The run-down greenhouse site at 5500 W. Silver Spring Drive now has 20 acres of production in 60 greenhouses. Allen hopes to increase the greenhouse acreage to 100.

But there's a whole lot of other activity - an apiary with 14 beehives, poultry hoops, outdoor livestock pens for goats and turkeys, and six hydroponic systems growing tilapia, perch and a variety of herbs and salad greens. Farm baskets of various sizes can be ordered for pickup on a weekly basis - unlike most CSAs, which require purchase of a seasonal share. There are classrooms and a kitchen. Tours are given at 1 p.m. every day.

Growing Power also has several urban farm projects in Chicago.

And Allen is growing soil.

"Our soil overall is 50% less nutrient-rich than it was in 1950. We have to grow new soil," he says. City soil also contains arsenic, lead and other chemicals, he says.

"So that's what we do. We grow soil."

That soil-growing happens with Growing Power producing compost on its urban farm in Milwaukee and its Merton farm. It uses recycled food waste (from Outpost Natural Foods), brewery waste (from Lakefront Brewery) and coffee grounds (from Alterra). The compost is a product of vermicomposting - described as an intensive composting in boxes with worms.

The Growing Power story and work have been noticed by everyone from first lady Michelle Obama, who invited him to the White House in February 2010 to help launch her "Let's Move" campaign, to Time magazine (Allen was named to the Time 100 World's Most Influential People in May 2010).

Grant-makers have taken notice, too: He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2008.

Last year, Milwaukee became one of 24 cities worldwide to receive an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grant of about $400,000 to help develop such cutting-edge urban farming - specifically Sweet Water Organics, the first commercial test of Allen's innovative aquaculture model for perch.

In his new book, written with Charles Wilson, Allen quotes the poet Maya Angelou about the notion that one can never truly leave home. "It's in your hair follicles. It's in the bend of your knees. The arch of your foot. You can't leave home . . . ."

That's why Allen proudly calls himself an urban farmer with a generations-deep connection to the soil he works.

"It's all about the soil," he says. "Everything about food is about the soil. If you remember anything that I say, it's all about the soil."